workshop

Social Media for Emergency Planning & Resilience

A quick plug of this great workshop being delivered through the Public Sector Web Network (about which I will shortly have some very exciting news!).

Social Media for Emergency Planning & Resilience

Thursday 22nd September 2011, Park Plaza Hotel, Leeds

This workshop is aimed at all Category 1 Responders as identified in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 which includes the usual “blue-light” emergency services as well as others:

  • Police forces, including the British Transport Police
  • Fire services
  • Emergency medical services in the United Kingdom
  • HM Coastguard
  • Local authorities
  • Port Health Authorities
  • Primary Care Trusts, Acute Trusts, Foundation Trusts (and Welsh equivalents), Health Protection Agency
  • Environment Agency and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency

A category one responder or other organisation planning for major incidents should:

  • have the capacity to process between 3,000-20,000 items of social media traffic per day during the response phase of an emergency *routinely monitor social media for operational data and potentially for triggers for emergency response
  • understand the potential of the global online community in emergency response
  • understand the implications of online culture in managing an emergency.

This workshop will help attendees to not only maximise the benefit of situational intelligence but also manage social media flows robustly and warn and inform the public effectively.

Please contact Nick Hill at nick@publicsectorforums.co.uk to reserve a delegate place!

Workshop Facilitator: Ben Proctor 

Ben has a background in Public Relations, Information Technology and Emergency Planning. In 2008 he saw that emergency response and crisis communications were going to be strongly affected by developments in mobile and online technology so he set up Likeaword to become a centre of expertise in digital skills for emergencies. Ben is based in Shropshire, UK but works across the country with category one responders and other organisations looking to manage their response to emergencies. He works with emergency planning and business continuity professionals as well as with corporate communication specialists.

Agenda

1 Welcome and introduction

2 Check we’re all on the same page

  • quick summary of civil contingency arrangements, the roles and responsibilities of responders and individuals within responders
  • quick round up of social media, related online technology, and relevant mobile technology
  • introduce an emergency scenarios to be explored during the day as a desktop exercise

3 Use of social media for warning and informing the public

Social media offers responders a simple, low cost broadcast medium and many responders have begun to use it in this way

  • case studies of effective uses of the technology
  • discussion on strengths and weaknesses of the technology and the risks inherent in its use including discussion of the implications of power and telecoms failure
  • discussion on how social media for warning and informing can be integrated into emergency plans
  • run desktop exercise to examine how social media for warning and informing could be introduced into management

Lunch

4 Managing feedback in the social media space

Social media allows all individuals and organisations access to the same simple, low-cost broadcast medium. Individuals may ask for clarification, they may challenge or may spread rumours or contrary information.

  • case studies of effective uses of the technology
  • discussion on strengths, weaknesses and risks of various approaches (passive, reactive, proactive)
  • discussion on integration into emergency plans
  • discussion on the training and exercising implications of effective management of feedback
  • re-run desktop exercise with new injects to model social media feedback

5 Working with the online community

Social media and online technology gives responders potential access to a worldwide community of relevant skills. This section will introduce the topic.

  • case studies and examples of interesting and effective community engagement in emergencies (and independet community response)
  • discussion on the implications for responders

6 Wrap up

  • re-cap over the day’s learning
  • opportunity to cover points that may have been missed
  • some suggestions for further reading and discussion

Address:
Park Plaza Hotel
Boar Lane, City Square
Leeds
LS1 5NS
Map and Directions

Start Time: 9:30 am
End Time: 4:30 pm

Price: £200.00 + £40.00 Surcharge

Please contact Nick Hill at nick@publicsectorforums.co.uk to reserve a delegate place!

Social media strategy seminar roundup

Photo by @bredadoherty

The seminar yesterday in Edinburgh went pretty well, I think. We had a great turnout – about 30 people – which was surprising as we were only expecting 25, and meant we had to find some extra room. Luckily the staff at COSLA were very accommodating!

Thanks also to Mike and the team at the Improvement Service for their help in laying on the seminar.

The session was run on the lines of going through the stages of a social media strategy, with me doing some introductory words, then groups discussing the issues, and then filling in the relevant section of their workbook, and some feedback. Rinse and repeat for each section…

Here are the slides I used. The most useful bits are probably the questions to consider when completing that bit of the strategy.

If you can’t see the embed above, then here’s a PDF copy to download.

Here’s the workbook.

Here’s a Word version if you’d like one you can edit and play around with.

Would anyone else be interested in attending a session like this? Let me know!

Dave @ NCVO Conference

I’m going to be running a session at the NCVO Information Conference on 24th November. I’m facilitating one of the practical workshops, playing the social media game to help delegates put some of what they have learned on the day into some kind of context.

It looks like it is going to be a great event, with some top speakers including Euan Semple and Ed Mitchell. It should also mean that I get to meet Laura Whitehead for the first time, despite having known her virtually for quite a while now!

Social Media Big Day Out

I’m the (or rather now, ‘a’, but more on that later) facilitator at an online community of practice for social media and online collaboration using the Communities of Practice platform put together by Steve Dale at the Improvement and Development Agency. It’s ostensibly for local government, but I like to operate a big tent, and so anyone with a public sector interest can come along.

Yesterday we ran our first face-to-face meeting ludicrously entitled the ‘Big Day Out’. Given that it was held where I work, at the LSC National Office in Coventry, it wasn’t much of a day out for me, but hey! who cares. I took a few photos, some of which are below, the rest here.

The day ran pretty well, starting with a short and probably quite boring introduction from me:

[slideshare 283861 social-media-cop-intro-1204122043184802-4]

We then moved onto more interesting stuff, notably chats from Hadley Beeman and Shane McCracken on what they have been up to recently.

(That’s Hadley, by the way. Not Shane.)

Later on we played a little game, a cut-down version of David Wilcox‘s Social Media Game – although as Tim Davies pointed out mine is best overall because the cards are laminated. Two teams set each other scenarios which they had to solve using different social media and web 2.0 tools.

I think it was a useful exercise as everyone got to learn something about a web service they didn’t know existed before.

Next up was Steve Dale, chatting to us about the latest developments tech-wise on the CoP platform. There’s going to be some really interesting new features added, which will at the very least make facilitating the communities an awful lot easier.

Finally we had a little chat about the future of the Community, what we could do to improve participation and what we got out of it all. Michael Norton of the IDeA had a wicked-cool idea about setting group social media challenges, making us go out and try new stuff, and reporting back on our findings. One is already under way on YouTube. Nice one!

Throughout the day, the ever resourceful Carl Letman was doing a great job of videoing some of the action, and soon I should be able to post some highlights up here. If you need any video work doing, whether on or offline, Carl really is your man.

I also requested a bit of help of the facilitation side, and thankfully I got a great response from Michael, Hadley, Steve and Carl. So hopefully we should be able to keep the Community active and ensure that everyone gets the support they need.

What was also nice was that everyone said they would like to do it again. Hopefully if the word gets out that it was a fun day, then more folk might be encouraged to come along. Noel Hatch of Kent County Council has already offered to host, and suggested we could run it virtually in parallel using Second Life. He’s mad. Let’s do it.

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